Index Funds vs. Individual Stocks: Why I Changed My Investment Strategy in 2026
The Table with Anthony ONeal
Anthony O'Neal shares his personal journey from investing in individual stocks like BlackBerry to adopting a consistent, index fund-based st
Key takeaways
- Investing in individual stocks is often a bet against professional analysis and market wisdom, not a path to wealth.
- Consistency over time beats trying to be the smartest investor every day.
Main topics
- Index funds vs. individual stocks
- Emotional investing and market timing
Notable quotes
When you invest in individual stocks, you're betting that you know something the entire market doesn't.
I stopped trying to be the smartest guy in the room and I started trying to be the most consistent guy in the room.
Conclusion
Anthony O'Neal concludes that true financial freedom comes not from chasing hot
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Family, I used to think I was real smart with money, especially when I got into the financial world. And then I quickly realized that I wasn't. Man, I used to sit up in my bed scrolling the stock apps at midnight thinking I was one good pick, one good stock away from changing my whole financial situation. And what I want to tell you exactly. The one mistake that cost me a lot and exactly what I what I am doing now instead, because I promise you the way I used to invest back in the days looks totally different from what I am doing today. And if you're still investing the old way, if you're still stuck in the old way of doing things, today's episode is going to save you a lot of money, a lot of stress and watch this a lot of time. Now, listen. This is not a story about me. If you ever opened up a trading app, seen a stock climbing and thought, let me throw a couple of hundred dollars or let me just throw $50 at this real quick. I need you to hear me on this. If you've got money sitting in an account right now and you genuinely don't know why you picked what you picked, I need you to hear today's episode. And if you've been putting off investing altogether because it feels complicated, it feels risky, it feels like something smart people do only, today's episode is especially for you too. Because here is the truth. How you invest matters more than when you start to invest. And I had to relearn that the hard way, that how I am investing matters way more Then how much I'm investing. So here's what we're going to be doing for the next 30 minutes. Give me 25 minutes, I would say. I'm going to show you the mistake I made with individual stocks. I'm going to show you the moment that flipped a switch within my brain, I would say. I'm also going to tell you exactly why I moved my own money to a different platform, investing platform to be specific, and what that actually changed for me. Then I'm going to give you the math. I should probably put my thing on mute. All right. I'm going to give you the real numbers that made boring investing make more sense to me than exciting investing ever did. And I'm going to close it out with the exact five step system I use today. So you can copy it before this video ends. All right. But before I get to any of that, I got to take you back to the mistake that started, I would say, all of this and that it inspired today's episode. You see, a while back, I'm about to share with you my age. I purchased stock in a company called BlackBerry. I don't know, Ed, Timmy, we could put a picture up of a blackberry. But now if you're under 30 years old, you might not even know what a blackberry is. But at one point, that was the phone. Everyone had one. If you were an entrepreneur or a business person, every entrepreneur had one on their hip like it was a badge. And I'm talking about we had a case. We would put the phone inside that we would have on the side of our hip. And I used to think like, yo, this company is never going anywhere. This is a smart buy. So I put money in it. Felt good internally. Felt like I had figured something out that other people hadn't. You already know where this is going because half of you all watching right now has never even heard of a Blackberry. Because all of the sudden, your phone came out. Speaker 1 (4:01) The Eiffel. Speaker 2 (4:03) The world moved on. And that stock I felt so confident about. It just died. And I lost real money. Not because I was reckless, but because I thought picking one company I liked was the same thing as building wealth. And it's not the same thing. Liking a brand and understanding an investment are two completely different skills. But I only had one of them. I didn't know how to build wealth, but I liked BlackBerry. And here's the lesson I want you to take from that, because this is the whole reason this episode exists today. When you invest in individual stocks, you're betting that you know something the entire market doesn't. You're betting against professional analysis, hedge funds, and even the algorithms. Speaker 2 (5:05) People whose entire job every single day is to know more than you about that one company. I wasn't in a game. I was just a guy who liked his BlackBerry phone. And that mistake, number one, I would say I had to unlearn that. But it wasn't the only thing that shifted for me. The second thing was watching how I actually treated the money. I was investing. And that's where it gets a little, a little vulnerable and a little emotional and a little embarrassing, if I'm being honest. See, even after Black, even after the Blackberry lesson, I still had this idea that investing required me to be smart every single day, checking the market, timing buys, trying to catch the dip. And to be honest with you all, it was exhausting. And honestly, it made me nervous about my own money instead of confident with my own money. If I'm working every single day, nine to five, I should, I should be confident about what I'm investing in. Then I started paying attention to something a lot less exciting called index funds. Speaker 1 (6:29) I Speaker 2 (6:29) see an index fund is not one company. It's not a bet on BlackBerry. Watch this. Let me bring it up to today's day and time is not a bet solely on Apple. The iPhone is not a bet on any single name. Instead, it is a basket. Hundreds of companies bundled together. So if one of them falls apart, it doesn't sink your whole future with it. You see, the most well-known one tracks the S &P 500, which historically has averaged somewhere around 10 % return over long stretches of time. Speaker 2 (7:09) I know some financial advisors say 7%, but no, if you go back and you do the research for yourself and average it out, 10%. Now, now, now, now stay with me because this is the part where the math starts to matter. If you put a hundred dollars, just a hundred dollars into something like that and just left it alone over time, you never put no more money in it. You just put a hundred dollars in it and you left it. Historically speaking, that $100 would have had the potential to grow to somewhere around $1,800. I'm not talking about a secret stock. I'm not talking about a secret tip. I'm simply talking about timing. I'm talking about picking something boring, leaving it alone, and allowing time to be your best friend. Speaker 2 (8:05) And that number sat with me because here's what it means. The boring choice outperformed. Watch this. The exciting choice. The thing that I thought was smart, hunting for the next Blackberry. Watch this. Hunting for the next iPhone. Hunting for for the next space X actually put me in a more risk. Well. Yeah, yeah. Actually put me in more risk, at more risk, I would say, for less reward than the thing I thought was boring. That flipped something inside of me. I stopped trying to be the smartest guy in the room and I started